The Janus kinase (JAK)-signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) signaling pathway, which was activated abnormally in various cancers to increase the proliferation, survival, drug resistance and metastasis of cancer cells (Wang T. et al., 2018; Johnson et al., 2018), was identified from the KEGG pathway analysis, based on ncRNAs with significantly different expression levels selected by the genome-scale clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-Cas9 knockout screening in GISTs with imatinib resistance (Cao J. et al., 2018). Here, STAT3 is linked to cancer.